We are excited to announce several updates to Azure Migrate’s assessment and migration capabilities. Cloud migration can be a complex project, which is why Microsoft is committed to advancing its migration services to support all your migration needs through expanded scenarios and capabilities. Azure Migrate is Microsoft’s central service for datacenter migration. It features a central hub of migration tools to discover, assess, and migrate your datacenter to the cloud. The service is free to use with your Azure subscription, accessible through the Azure portal.
First, begin your migration project by performing a datacenter discovery to plan the migration and mitigate risks. Azure Migrate helps you discover servers, inventory the applications running on them, and identify dependencies between servers. The discovery process helps you identify and group the workloads to be migrated and plan your migration waves. Server discovery is completely agentless and can discover servers running on any cloud including servers that are virtualized on VMware or Hyper-V, physical machines, or virtual machines running in other public clouds. For VMware virtual machines, Azure Migrate can perform agentless application discovery and dependency mapping at scale, with a single Azure Migrate appliance now capable of analyzing dependencies for up to 1000 virtual machines in one project. This allows you to visualize connections and process-level details between machines, which helps with grouping them for assessment and migration. You can learn more about agentless dependency mapping here.
With a better understanding of your server estate and dependencies, you can generate an assessment report to understand Azure readiness, cloud cost estimations, and right-sizing recommendations. Read more about best practices for assessments in our prioritizing assessments blog.
With the assessment complete, you’ll be ready to migrate your workloads safely and efficiently. The Azure Migrate Server Migration tool now lets you migrate UEFI machines to Azure Gen 2 virtual machines. With no boot type conversion needed, you can migrate UEFI machines as is and take advantage of additional Gen 2 virtual machine features. You can now also select a specific Availability Zone to place migrated machines in when migrating to an Azure Region that supports Availability Zones to achieve increased resiliency and security.
Looking for more than just a lift-and-shift server migration for your datacenter? Azure Migrate now supports migrating .NET applications to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The brand-new feature is available in preview, and allows you to containerize ASP.NET applications and run them on Windows containers in AKS.
